As we all know, the new FISA legislation allows warrantless wiretapping of any communication involving an overseas participant. As it is being construed is that this only applies if one or more participants are physically located outside the borders of the U.S. However, what if domestic communication were routed overseas and then back again, say a mile or so over the border into Canada and back to the U.S.. Would these qualify as foreign communications? If so, you can bet your ass that the NSA is currently engaging in this as an end around the law, and is probably colluding with the Canadian (or others) government to do this. Think about it: 1. The NSA has access to the AT&T infrastructure, through which runs roughly 1/2-2/3 of entire global internet traffic. 2. The NSA determines that is is illegal to wiretap domestic-only communications. 3. The NSA reroutes the communications to Canada or overseas, before transmitting the communications back to NSA headquarters. 4. Since the communications were, at any time, outside U.S. borders, they are classified as international communications. 5. The NSA now begins monitoring ALL global traffic, domestic or otherwise.
This is a big what-if theory, but from my limited knowledge of the NSA, this is: a) very feasible, and b) probable to likely. IBM has a 1Pflop supercomputer (the roadrunner) up and running-- which was built, incidentally, for the U.S. military. The NSA most assuredly has supercomputers that are at least 2-3 times more powerful. Why is this computing power important. The extreme spreed of these supercomputers means that the NSA has the shear power to run more than 10^18 operations a second; in layman's terms, this computer could run the ENTIRE backbone of the internet as a mere application, much like you run Firefox or Word. By being able to simultaneously run all of the data, filtering and sorting become much more easy.
In effect, the NSA has computers capable of sorting every single email being sent right now, along with with every webpage being looked at, and every bank transaction currently underway. 128, 192, and 256-key Encryption technology does slow them down, but as we approach 2-5 Pflop machines, the time needed for successful brute force attacks reduces to a number of days, hours, minutes (down from centurys or millenia).
Scary, isn't it? Anyone with more knowledge about supercomputers or the NSA feel free to comment below, or PM me if you have something especially juicy.
As an added bonus, here's a youtube of the
NSA supercomputer cooling system